Posts by peter-

More to do with the charger letting the battery alone

The problem here more seems to be in the power supply leaving the battery alone when it's ok.

The last 20% charge with low current isn't good for the battery (note how you'll find plug-in hybrid vehicles never fully charging/discharging their batteries). So in "all day plugged in" environments a lot will depend on the system's strategy of when to leave the battery alone and when to actually try and top it off.

It does indeed seem like Apple's doing something right there and that ThinkPads are a bit clunky at it, because I've seen many office ThinkPads (and the same with some Fujitsu Siemens machines) that after less than 2 years had their batteries badly degraded (<30min useful life) but nothing comparable with Macbooks, not even with the old Powerbooks.

Now I remember from some old support documents that they left the battery alone after charging until it had fallen to 95% before trying to fill it up again. But this is many years ago and they have probably refined that

Careful throwing stones here, are we?

It's pretty normal and expectable that an industry hit by cutbacks is making noise.

Then again paying out subsidies to something that you think is important for your countries' future is a normal thing as well. You can well argue they're spending less on subsidizing fossil fuels, but then again these are known to be on the way out and are mostly produced outside Spain.

However if you do look at the history of Spanish owned petrol group Repsol YPF and their success in Spain and Latin america you will find that back in the old days this was enabled by... subsidies!

I think there are certainly worse things to spend money on than renewables. Anyway, this is a politics question and it was on the agenda when this government was voted into office.

Now if we look at the tone in which you ridicule "dead broke Spain" shall we remember that the UK has both a larger annual deficit and total debt? And yes, we're talking percentages of GDP already, so the UK's stronger economy is already factored in.

Not quite sure how this is Apple's fault

So let's set apart the exotic issues on the discussion forums. After all you can't consider a thread of a guy with a messed-up system (Disk Utility reporting errors) with 3 replies that amount to "have you tried pushing the repair button?" a mass phenomenon.

When it comes to the so-called add-ons, you should keep in perspective that until now there was no extensions interface, so everything there is are hacks using undocumented interfaces. Some of them quite great ones and I myself have been using SafariCookies and PithHelmet.

But it must also be clear that such hacks are prone to breaking whenever you update the host software.

The more civilized ones therefore automatically refuse to load when they find a version they were not built for. If you don't want to rely on that, you should rather deactivate them yourself until they're tested and/or adapted to work with Safari 5.

Luckily most will be moving to the official extensions interface soon, so that should make things easier in the future

Same misleading rubbish as in Germany

There the family minister(!) is on a rant deploying a full-fledged internet censorship infrastructure citing the importance of blocking child pornography.

These ploys are so transparent it's stunning people fall for this rubbish.

There's still a bit of a hope this will give the Pirate party with their strong resistance a push in the general elections this month. But then again if the general public is as clever as usual that'll remain wishful thinking.

Another aspect I find worrying here is that the debate more and more shifts away from protecting children from exploitation to preventing ways of thought. So far there's nothing suggesting that preventing people from swapping child porn will prevent anyone from abusing kids. We have also not seen any sudden increase in child abuse through paedophile internet use (or if so nobody has bothered to tell us)

After all what we care about is not whether people get off to weird stuff, but to keep them from harming others with that. And we must ensure there's due punishment for those who do.